Clemency suggests

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Conduct becoming

Alex James

Wednesday, 28th May 2008

Alex James leads a Slow Life

That’s a lot of violins, I thought. Then I realised they were violas. The violins were to the left, smaller. Always smaller than I expect, violins — maybe because I wrestled with one as a child and it beat me: Tiny, pretty little things they are, with all the fleeting glamour and tyranny of a whole crowd of Hollywood starlets. Those always come up small, too.

The cellos were in their nest to the right of the violas. I don’t think there’s an instrument more beautiful to look at than the cello, all balancing curves and arches, setting off the perfect parallels and perpendiculars of the strings. The more I think about cellos, the more I want one. I’ve been meaning to get one for a while and suddenly there were a dozen at my fingertips.

Receding beyond the cellos in a tall, proud line were my people, the double basses. It’s the engine room, the bass department. I glanced over in that direction and two of them winked at me. That was encouraging. My brothers. Whatever I don’t know, which is a subject that is getting bigger all the time, I do know how to bang a bass. It used to be my job, playing the bass, in a rock’n’roll band. I never met a bass player I didn’t like either, and I allowed my gaze to rest with the basses for a moment trying to remember that I know something.

The simple geography of the string instruments, getting larger from left to right, was less confusing than I’d expected. There was a lot to take on board, though. It was hard to distinguish instantly the order in the ranks of the aerophones, the blown instruments. There was a glimpse of a bassoon poking out above a music stand. Oh, and there was the harp, and those curly ones, French horns, I think, and the percussionists holding the back line, where they muck around pulling faces at each other, if they’re any good.

There must have been 80 people in front of me and at my command — the BBC Concert Orchestra, one of the most versatile groups of players in the world, and now I was to conduct them playing one of my favourite pieces of music. I couldn’t have written this scenario any better. Only trouble was that I’d had about two hours of coaching, which isn’t really enough.

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